AUSTROP Annual report 04. (Nov 03 to Dec 04)

This is a seriously overdue report. I'm writing it just after the wet season has started with a true Daintree vengeance - we've had over 400 mm rain in the past 4 days - all the creeks are up - and there is no access either way - what a way to spend Christmas!!. So I'm presently confined to barracks, which is a good excuse to write this.

Visitors
We have had lots of visitors - Bruce Thomson (batter extraordinaire from EPA Toowoomba), Taylor Lockwood, the "fungi man" - entertained us for several days, Dr. Roger Kitching and Sarah Boulter from Griffith Uni. and the RF-CRC, Dr Dirk van Helden (U Newcastle) Frank Bonnacorso (bat worker from Hawaii), Murray Haselter and Stuart Cowell from the Australian Bush Heritage Fund (see under future). Dr Thilo Wasserthal (U Erlanger, Germany), Lee Curtis (nature journalist), Randy Hayes (Rainforest Action Network, USA) and Kelvin Davies (Rainforest Rescue - Brisbane). Tim Low (naturalist and author), Carol Booth (fighter extraordinaire for the flying foxes from Grfiffith Uni), as well as many others.

Volunteers
30 From Australia, Germany, UK, America, Canada, Quebec, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, France and New Zealand - seriously international!

Interns
13 Australia, Germany, Holland, UK, Switzerland, and France

Students
3 - from USA all through School for International Training.

What is becoming more common is that volunteers and interns are staying longer, (students tend to be limited to the 3-4 weeks that their project time allows) - stays of over 4 months are becoming increasingly common.

Tony
As if in answer to our prayers - an English Australian couple arrived (through the good graces of Brigitta) - early in 04. Tony Young is a computer programmer and flying fox afficionado, so Tony runs the Bat House and programs PC's for the GPS project Tony has taken up residence in the far cabin - which is now a "bat - tery" - with at a minimum of 4 bats in care at any one time - Slim, Blaster, Tribbie-lee and Chloe.

Sheryll
Sheryl is a alternative medicine practicioner and is writing a treatise on medicinal plants and is our principal baby bat carers. If Sheryl can't save a sick baby flying fox (or an adult for that matter) NO ONE can!!

Building. 5th cabin.
Eventually the long-awaited second hand timber materialised, thanks to Mark Herridge, and the construction of the building started, aided by very enthusiastic volunteers from UK (Kate, Lorna and Bill) and Denmark (Anne), Norway (Therese) NZ (Kathy) and many others, with professional assistance from Steve the crocodile man. The two ISV groups did wonderful work in putting in the rafters and the roofing (as well as load-testing the structure!) - so it is almost ready - just needs window and door installation and the odd leak fixing (this is great leak-test weather!) - hopefully I will be in my residence in early 05. (After 16 years of shared living, it will be nice to have something private to rattle around in).

Bat House - 12V power, bat display
The Bat House has had a major upgrade in its lighting, after the old inverter self-destructed. We have switched to new 12V compact fluoro lamps (and rewired the ceiling to take them - the white tailed rats having destroyed most of the old wiring). We now have 9 lamps (fitted into the old reflectors of the 240V ones). Total current draw comes to 4A (on our 12V system) - which means we have plenty of power available from our new pole-mounted solar array - even in lousy weather. The Bat House is now much brighter and welcoming.

Due to continual pressure from Qld Parks and Dept of Tropical Health, we have shifted the bat display to the rear of the building - and our poor bats are sequestered behind a Perspex screen so the public can't touch them. It is a real frustration to Sunshine who loved to "trapeze" on the hanging net, with the express aim of landing on someone's lap, and Rex and Jasper aren't too happy about it either! (Pushkin doesn't care). However it greatly reduces the likelihood of Tropical Health descending on the Station and demanding the corpses of ALL our bats for Lyssa virus testing - because someone got scratched and complained, something that has been in the offing for some time.

Labs.
In early January the refrigeration unit on the first lab died, still not quite sure what caused it - so Hugh took on the mantle of refrigeration engineer, with lots of assistance from colleagues in the "green" refrigeration industry, redesigned and rebuilt it to operate on Hy Chill's "minus 10" a cyclopropane refrigerant which is as environmentally neutral as you will get. To his amazement it charged up and has been running as well, if not better, than the original R124a (an refrigerant which is anything BUT environmentally neutral) unit. So refrigeration blues have become a bit of a thing of the past.(and if it busts H now knows how to fix them!). The refrigerator on the new lab, is a R124a system - but, at the moment, it ain't broke, and we are not going to fix it and it is behaving well.

Coupled with that, Hugh had to do a research survey of refrigerants and their greenhouse impacts (with the able help of intern Vanessa Tietze), but the hoped for report never materialised as too many other things happened at once! Maybe this next year it will get re-visited (as it is really a critical environmental issue that has been swept under the carpet by the Australian Governments).

New lab facilities
In December last year, Hugh went to Sydney to initiate delivery of a new toy for the laboratory - a gas chromatograph (Varian 3400) - from a dealer in second hand laboratory apparatus (Mr Alfonso Segura - who has been very accommodating to the Station in the past). This was a major (and quite expensive-for us) purchase - but Alfonso threw in all manner of other goodies as well - so we got capillary columns, and various other expensive extras for the Chromatograph. We also brought a hydrogen generator - which relieves us of having to have bottled H2 gas on the Station - it generates pure hydrogen from distilled water electrically. We also brought goodies for the HPLC as well - so we are now very well set up. However, commissioning the Varian has been an interesting procedure - and we ain't there yet. Primarily, it doesn't like the power system - being a glorified electric forced-air oven with computer control, it eats power for breakfast - it is happy with the inverter, but the current drops over the 50 meters or so of cable from the Solar system to the lab makes it very unhappy. A pity - as we have some really interesting projects to use it for. So next year, this will force a serious re-design of our power system (which was in the offing anyway). At least Alltech (GC supply company) have been doing well! - you have no idea how expensive that stuff is - and they have been very helpful!

GPS project
We received 30,000 dollars from the Perpetual Trustees in December last year (Samuel and Eileen Gluyas CharitableTrust, and the McKinnon Trust). Tony Young is responsible for the computing side of the project, and I am the general coordinator. We have had the unbelievable good luck to snare Tim Miller, a young UK electrical engineer, who has married one of our local conservationists (Jane Powell). Tim has expertise in the very areas that we are interested in, and is a very pleasant person to boot. However, it all has started rather slowly, as Tim had to jump all the hoops set in place by the Australian Department of Immigration, and there are lots of them - getting married isn't enough nowadays! And they have had to buy and set up a house as well - and this all has taken a lot of time and energy. But now the project is slowly rolling along. As the project involves not only gathering the geographic position data (with the bat collars) it also involves integrating that data with the existing GIS data bases. Not as easy as one might think (especially as here in N Qld, some of the maps which were used to create the data bases date from the 50's). So we have had Brice le Maire, as part of his internship project, running around with the GPS logger following roads and trails (i.e. being a bat) and Tony and Tim tried to integrate the resultant traces honto the GIS. Almost there.

With luck, the first trial collars will be in place by April. We have developed a formal tie with the University of New South Wales Photovoltaic Group (through Dr Robert Largent), and they have kindly suppled the high efficiency solar cells for the prototype collars.

Website
Still languishing - Tony Young has agreed to work on it (web design turns out to be one of his secret vices) - but Hugh still has to sort the stuff to go on it ^&^*&(*()*)!! BUT IT WILL BE ON-LINE BY THE TIME THIS ARRIVES!! (but not necessarily updated!!).

Power system
It has had its ups and downs this year. The batteries are still surviving (thanks to the de-sulphators) , but 2 more of the cells that were severely discharged last year, have failed and were replaced under warranty. The alternator died early this year, necessitating a major rewind and tropic proofing. The tracker circuit modules all failed, and we have not had time to re-design and build new ones - (they cannot be purchased). With Tony and Tim occupying one lab, and students and Hugh and the GC occupying the other, the power system has been under pretty severe load. In November, the Trace inverter failed (but after 9 years of continuous service, that was not too bad) - and for 3 weeks we were reliant on the generator. We had hoped to put in a hydro-generator designed to use the "run of the stream" (as we do not have enough head for a conventional turbine), but we haven't had the time to make the very necessary modifications to allow it to operate underwater. Next year, I guess!!

So next year - major system re-design, turbine and a new solar array is in the offing.

De-sulphator
This project was completed very successfully, but hasn't been publicly launched, which is a great shame - too expensive to print, (so to our disgust it will have to be CD "rom-ed") and, because of the great conservation battle for the Daintree, - Hugh and the co-author, Paul Hollis have found themselves on opposite sides of the very divisive issue of land buy-back and Paul seems to have withdrawn. Very sad, but illustrative of the mess this place is in socially as well as environmentally. So that's on the table for early next year.

Conservation
Weeds
Weeds continue to be a major environmental issue. The two most dominant ones are coconuts and Singapore Daisy (Weigelia).

Coconuts
If the conservation of the area, and the means to achieve it are not divisive enough issues here - add coconuts to the mix and stir well. Introduced to the area in the 40's, and planted by the early leasehold settlers and the beachcombers (and not native to present day Australia), they have now become a major feature of the beachscape (and damn near everywhere else). But it is on the beach that their impact is really evident, occupying as much as 90% of the beach foreshore. Over the past 2 years Hugh and a number of volunteers have been despatching mature coconut trees (at randomly selected locations along the beach) to their maker - hoping that it would be seen as "coconut blight" - ha - we didn't plug the holes∧ were found out. All hell broke loose - and I won't go into the details. Suffice it to say that in Cape Trib. Hugh became known as the "Mad Coconut Killing Greenie" (at the most polite). It became quite hysterical - with some Douglas Shire Council members baying for his blood. Most of the locals were aware of the coconut issue and basically felt they had to go -but were not prepared to say as much (for obvious reasons). It became an issue at the Community Council (Hugh is the secretary) and that provided a good community forum to debate the issue - we discovered that, residents from Europe were "coconutophiles" and the rest hated them or were indifferent. The Douglas Shire Council, despite having major issues (mostly safety) with coconuts, weren't brave enough to support culling.

The Station carried out a detailed analysis of the impacts of coconuts on the beach flora - which indicated that they completely obliterate the native flora, and that they have increased over 5x since 1986 , but it is seen as too politically "Hot" - even by some of the outside weed control lobby groups!!!!

Singapore Daisy
Lovely little yellow flowered daisy from Equador, brought in for ground cover - and it covers the ground very rapidly and effectively - eliminating everything else. A prostrate creeper, it roots at nodes and breaks at nodes, so every node can be a new plant. Luckily it doesn't set much seed. Two years ago we discovered a severe infestation on the beach immediately to the South of Cape Tribulation which wasn't there 3 years earlier. It has taken from then until the beginning of December this year to eliminate it (and we still have to check at least 2x yearly for seedlings). Luckily the herbicide met-sulfuron-methyl (Brush-off) is incredibly selective for it - making its elimination a matter of spraying sufficiently regularly. There are some very severe outbreaks in some of the newly proclaimed wet tropics lands in the area.

However, Queensland Parks and Wildlife really resent our weed control activities - corporate pride I suspect. Many efforts made over the past 2 years to get them to provide us with the necessary training (which is very simple) to get a Agricultural Chemical and Disposal Course certificate (ACDC- don't snigger) to keep everybody on the good side of Health and Safety, (bigger than King Kong I've been told by QPWS personnel) have failed utterly. So as far as weed control is concerned - if they can't do it, it shall not be done (and they are grossly under-funded and understaffed - but no matter - no one else shall look after the environment). So we have to be a tad secretive - which is no fun and is quite ridiculous.

This place really is nuts.

Bats and bat bubs
Nellie has has her second pregnancy which ended with a bonnie girl bub. No dropping babies as she did last year. We have 4 babies from Whiting Road colony in the Tablelands (tick paralysis mothers) plus 1 tick paralysed baby plus one that just happened to be dropped (by mum) into a glass bottomed boat!! Feeding and entertaining the babies tends to become a major focus for volunteers (and overseen by Sheryl)!! We lost Junior to a tick in November (in the cage!! - the 3rd of our captive bats to die from tick paralysis - due to grubbing on the ground for dropped food from the buckets) - at least, at 16 years old, he didn't die in vain - he was sent off to Samantha Fox who is doing her PHD on aging in FF's - and he was the 3rd known age bat she has been able to get.

Finances
These continue to be a major pain. While the Foundation/Station is well and truly solvent, the time and energy demands generated by Environment Australia reportage requirements, Goods and Services Tax and auditing can get paralysing, seriously so. Barbara (a friend of Hugh's and an accountant), helped out a lot earlier this year, and we have managed to get Anna (a delightful Mossman-based bookkeeper) to take over the job. This will free Hugh (and volunteers ) from the arduous exercise of trying to manage finances with an ill-set up accounting package, and save us lots of fines! We will have to increase charges though, as income just manages to cover costs, leaving us no "fat" for Station expenses. The Bat House has performed very well this year, thanks in no small measure to Tony and the volunteers and interns who have run it. However, as ever we are ALL volunteers - were anybody to require a salary - we'd all be down the gurgler! It is a pretty fragile situation.

SIT
We continue to host students from Students for International Training (SIT) and they continue to be excellent students - well focussed and willing, and able to deal with the situations and uncertainties that this remote area throws up. This year we had Joanna Arlukiewicz from California in Nov 03 - who examined the effectiveness of organizations such as the Bat House in educating the visiting general public on flying fox conservation issues. Next was Sara Ko who looked at activity patterns of captive flying foxes, and Sarah Brewster (Wisconsin) who examined the attractiveness of cluster figs to their pollinating wasps. We hope to have many more next year.

ISV
We hosted 2 groups of 10 student / volunteers from International Student Volunteers (based in the USA) - in June/July (2 weeks each, "back to back" ) this year and had the great good fortune of having Kara Youngentob as their "staff member" accompanying them. Kara was here last year, and really was a joy to work with, so this made having students for 1 month without a break, possible. Next year we are expecting 3 groups, and we hope we can get Kara again. Not only are they here for a "learning experience" but also as volunteers (which I admit, I hadn't really 'twigged" onto that until this year ) - so this year they did a wide variety of jobs - regeneration, and building being the main ones - and running the Bat House was the other really popular occupation.

Regeneration
Our 1/2 Ha (1 acre) of regeneration planted in January this year, has grown fantastically - probably the best growth rate that we have ever had. Many thanks to Daniel who (with Karien and Kristin) planted most of it. We had an initial panic - when the planting period was followed by 1 week of clear hot weather - and we put in the irrigation system quick smart but only had to use it 2 x. We have another 1/2Ha ready for planting - and even have the irrigation piping in place - not going to be caught out again! Over 200 trees are ready to plant. This time we will be providing all our plant stock, previously about half came from the community Cassowary Care Group. At this rate we'll have finished regenerating the property in about 5 more years!! Of course, nature is doing its job too - with lots of natural regeneration - but weeds such as lantana are really taking off in some of the areas we haven't reached yet.

Intern projects
Joern Ebertz Germany (Eberswalde) - Joen was given the rather unenviable task of pulling together the material from the past 3 cyclone regeneration groups. A very daunting project indeed - and he has carried it out really well (and his botanical learning curve was, what might be termed vertical!). We now a large portfolio of graphs of growth and species diversity maps - what has to happen now is for Hugh to find a clear month to finally write it up!!

Daniël de Kruijk (Netherlands) Saxion Uni. Daniel investigated the fruiting phenology of Ficus congesta , a common cluster fig on the Station.

Kristin Rostad USA. Kristin analysed the relationship between cluster-fig geocarpic fruit and the presence of parasite wasps.

Vanessa Tietze (Germany) - Vanessa spent her internship researching the climate impact of refrigerants.

Matt Hannon (Australia) Deakin U Matt investigated the attitudes of local residents towards the conservation of the Daintree lowlands.

Rowan Cockroft (Scotland) U of Aberdeen. Rowan spent his time up a stepladder assessing the differential visitation rates of parasitoid and pollinating wasps to Ficus congesta.

(Dr) Denise Hodge (UK) - well not exactly an intern - assisted with the first efforts at getting the Gas Chromatograph operational.

Willy Schmid (Switzerland) - Willy is a biology teacher and was taking a vacation - for his project he created a portfolio of water colour paintings of the bats and the Station activities

Joana Meyer (Switzerland) Lausanne. Joana hoped to to analyse the neck secretions of the flying foxes using the GC, but we had a major surprise - none of the methylation derivatising reagents were held in stock in Australia (3 month back order). So she produced a power point presentation on the Station, and a most valuable flow diagram for the operation of the GC. .

Brice le Maire (France) Gif sur Yvette. Brice studied the distribution of the marker tree Calophyllum along the Myall beach front, looking for evidence of changes in beach geometry. This project made much use of the GPS logger system.

Annika Stroeh (Germany) Hamburg. Annika trapped and radio-tracked bush rats (Rattus fuscipes ) on the Station property, to determine their 24hr movement patterns.

Stephanie Ritz (Germany) Cologne. Stephanie has been trapping and releasing blossom and tube nosed bats and collecting fecal samples, which she examined to find and identify pollen and seeds. A big discovery was that the blossom bats as feeding on the fruits of a climbing pandanus - Freycinetia.

Personal
Hugh's neuralgia tends to come and go - but is almost a non-event now (though a wisdom tooth abscess started it off again for a couple of months!). He is being trying to write up the treatment regime he has developed - which has been very successful - he went NZ in August to visit an old friend, and experienced Christchurch's irascible weather - snow one day, sun the next! Met some wonderful conservationists trying to put back the original forests against considerable odds!
At the present he presents himself as a "one-armed paper hanger (busy as a)" -

Grants out.
Tolga Bat Hospital - $2,100.00
Bat Reach (Kuranda) $750.00
Seedling atlas $2,000.00
Daintree Wildlife Rescue $500.00
Bat Rescue $1100.00 (for pump for heat stress recovery for bats in S Qld and N NSW).

Major Grants in
$ 10,000 McKinnon Trust
$ 20,000 Samuel and Eileen Gluyas Charitable Trust
$ 1,100 Dr. Reinhold Muller
(this does not include the income from the Bat House, or smaller donations.).

Future
The Station and the Bat House appear to be quite secure for the foreseeable future. However SOMEONE will have to replace Hugh - he can go onbut he can't go on forever!

Bush Heritage Fund. We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bush Heritage Fund, with the expectation that this will be of mutual benefit to both of our groups, they obtain "shopfront" exposure through the Bat House (over 20,000 visitors a year from all over the world). We, on the other hand will get assistance with our regeneration work, and for both of our groups, we hope to become "bigger" as fund raisers and potential land managers for the Daintree.

Daintree -
this is now a raging ulcer in the body corporate - due to sheer cowardliness and political grandstanding by just about every body concerned. It has been a most demoralising exercise, and seems to be getting worse.

To quote a letter I wrote to the Australian Weekend Magazine..

"We (on behalf of the rest of the world) ask the Governments, State and Federal, to simply put the equivalent of one years' GST ($40 million) into buyback. Problem solved, most everybody happy (most of the older residents have been trying to sell for years - no market), kudos for environmental awareness, Daintree conserved, nature-based tourism industry sustainedI think it is called economic rationalism....or am I dreaming??"

So where do we go from here! - Julie Tessler (Program Director, Daintree Rainforest Land Trust, based in New York), has really been working hard to raise funds for Daintree Buy-back. Tides Foundation (San Francisco) provides us with tax-deductibility in the USA. At least we have a new Qld. Minister for Environment, Local Government and Women. (Quite a portfolio!) Dr Desley Boyle, a Cairns resident, and one who is quite on-side and really is committed - but she is constrained by the rest of the Government - but has acted in quite courageous ways to secure the Daintree.

Future Projects
Herbarium and seedling atlas. We have funded the seedling atlas project with Cairns-based Peter Newlin who is an excellent botanical artist, and who is also an excellent rainforest botanist this involves producing an illustrated handbook of seedling trees found in the wet tropics, with initial emphasis on those found in the Daintree. He has already produced a trial volume, which has had wide acclaim. This can be a 'flagship" project

Associated with this is a proposal to establish a regional Herbarium at the Station. With the future of the Atherton Herbarium in some doubt, and with the absence of any accessible herbarium for the local area, having a regional herbarium (specifically for species found in the Daintree region) would be a great value to researchers and conservationists alike. This would require external grant funding, and in effect would require the construction of a 3rd laboratory building specifically for the purpose. Peter is interested in curating this collection (and he has had considerable curatorial experience).

Hugh Spencer
Jan 05